Thanks to everyone that sent their comments and questions,
there are a few questions that I would like to answer that
have been a common theme.

These are my personal opinions, and do not represent in any
way Novell's official position (its at the end of every page
on my blog, but I figured its worth pointing out up front).

Q: Which Patents Does Mono Infringe?

I do not know of any patents which Mono infringes.

Although Novell provides most of the work to develop Mono,
Mono is still a community project with many constituents and
collaborators from companies, universities, governments and
individuals, and as such we will continue to work and operate
as a community project.

The Mono strategy for dealing with these technologies is as
follows: (1) work around the patent by using a different
implementation technique that retains the API, but changes the
mechanism; if that is not possible, we would (2) remove the
pieces of code that were covered by those patents, and also
(3) find prior art that would render the patent useless.

This is what we would have done before the agreement, and
that is what we will continue to do.

Not providing a patented capability would weaken the
interoperability, but it would still provide the free software
/ open source software community with good development tools,
which is the primary reason for developing Mono.

There is more information on the web site on the above
link.

We will continue to develop Mono under the same
restrictions that we had before the agreement.

Q: Is it now possible to integrate code that uses
Microsoft patents today?

Although it is possible, we will not integrate such code,
as Mono is a community project.

And we will also continue to keep the Microsoft and Mono
stacks separated, as there is no need to add dependencies
between them and also makes it easy to split out all the
non-ECMA components of Mono out.

Why did you guys work this deal with Microsoft?

Although I did not take part of the actual negotiations,
and was only told about this deal less than a week before the
announcement, I had been calling for a long time for a
collaboration between Microsoft and Open Source and Microsoft
and Novell.

There are numerous interviews that touch on this topic and
most recently my interview in Microsoft's Port25

In the past I had called for this same kind of cooperation
with other companies. In 1999, we started talking to Sun and
HP regarding GNOME; In particular in 2000 we had a meeting
with Marco Boerries at Sun to discuss the desktop, and their
adoption of GNOME as their new desktop. At that time we
discussed the plans to have a combined desktop made up of
components of StarOffice and GNOME (at that meeting, I
conceded that I would no longer work on Gnumeric, and instead
we would improve OpenOffice; Sun conceded that Evolution
would be their default mailer instead of the StarOffice one).

Have you not learned from history? Microsoft has
damaged all of their partners in the past!

I have gotten a few emails along those lines and folks
asking for comment, and a lot of hate mail (more than usual).
I find it hard to reply to this comment, because this is
really going to come down to personal opinions and personal
biases.

In my personal opinion, I think that we have to give it the
benefit of the doubt, try to turn the hand that has been dealt
into the best possible outcome for everyone. Or as Benjamin
Zander would say, I will give them an A, and work from there.

Similar deals have been done in the past, in 1997
Microsoft signed a similar deal with Apple, and Apple used
that agreement and the incoming monies to turn the company
around.

Sun signed
a similar agreement with Microsoft in 2004, which at the
time I realized enabled Sun to ship Mono on Solaris (which we
already supported at that time).

Now, I can not say that the crowd applauded Apple and Sun
at the time, and both of them ship a lot of GPL code, not the
Linux kernel, but a lot of GPL code, and the sky has yet to
fall on our heads.

I am counting the minutes for Sun to ship our Mono
implementation for Solaris. Maybe we can still make it to the
Solaris 10 release.

Just picture the benefits, out of the box free C# compiler
on Solaris SPARC and Solaris Intel. Out of the box ASP.NET and
ADO.NET on SPARC, and the Gtk# bindings for writing
applications for the Java Desktop System.

Not to mention that they get the industry's most sexy JIT
compiler for free.

I am walking with an extra cell phone battery in case
McNealy or Schwartz decide to call me up over the weekend to
discuss potential agreements (if I don't pick up, please leave
a message, the wonders of ATT wireless).

Am afraid to report that neither Scott nor Jonathan emailed
me or left a voice mail at the time. I think it would have
been grand for Sun, but maybe Java emotions were too strong
inside the company for this to be even considered.

Could a better deal been struck for the Open Source community?

Possibly. But I do not know what the latitude
was inside the deal.

What I can personally say is that considering that
Microsoft is 100 times larger than Novell (market cap wise
alone) it was probably difficult.

Getting rid of patents completely would probably have to
involve a few giants. Microsoft has a 282B market cap, so
maybe a combination of IBM (138B), Google (143B), Oracle (92B)
and even Sun (18B) would have to come together and enter a
gigantic patent love-fest to make a better deal for everyone
happen (By comparison Novell is at 2.2B).

And this is why I find it surprising that Sun's Simon
Phipps had forgotten that Sun entered a similar agreement a
few years ago, and had this
to say about the Microsoft/Novell deal:

It's a remarkable reversal of opportunity, all the more
remarkable that the Novell participants smiled the whole way
through what had clearly become a Microsoft event. They went
in seeking a huge payout, and emerged with the payout, yes -
but also with a commitment to pay it back in royalties on open
source software they sell.

A larger opportunity could probably happen with a setup
like the one I described previously. But whether this could
actually be done, is left as an exercise to the reader (or
alternative approaches that would completely eradicate
software patents from the map).

Let me point out that McNeily seemed to be all
smiles at the equivalent event a few years ago; Nothing
bad about that, but Simon probably should notice that Sun is
eight times larger than Novell, and if anything, his company
is 8.18 in a better position that Novell is to take advantage
of these opportunities.